Cross Country Hearts by Suzanne August

Fourteen

“Wanna see something cool?”

Ren comes down next, taking his shirt off before he takes his turn. Thomas attaches the backpacks to the rope and lets gravity pull them down to the other side. While everyone is waiting for him to come down, I climb over the cliff—which is only five feet high on this side of the canyon—and grab the bags from the tree the cable attaches to.

When I’m back, all three are on Sandy Place.

“Can we do it again?” I ask.

Lila laughs. “It takes about ten minutes to climb back up there. One of us will show you how to do it soon.”

This clearing on the bottom of the canyon, where the river doesn’t overflow, is like a crude beach. It’s not great sand. It’s muddy, dark, and almost gravely, but it’s a flat area large enough that people have turned it into a hang-out spot. Someone managed to bring down a barbecue for general use, and there are three weather-worn folding chairs. Spanning the area on this side of the canyon is the same dense forest.

“So, City Girl,” Ren says. He pulls a can of soda from his bag that must be warm by now. He opens it anyway. “How was that for you?”

It was like going on a roller coaster. It was the same feeling, but the adrenaline was more intense because I had control over what was going to happen and when I would drop.

“I like it,” I say, being honest. “Hand me a soda?”

Lila pulls one from her bag and throws it my way. “You loved it, June. I saw it all over your face.”

I catch the soda and can’t deny her words, so I don’t try. While Thomas fiddles with the barbecue and Lila fiddles with the old chairs, Ren waves me over. I don’t know when, but he’s taken out a camera. It’s not a cheap one. It’s bulky and professional. I remember Lila mentioning this morning that he’s a photographer.

“Wanna see something cool?” Ren asks.

“Sure.”

I don’t know when Ren had the time to whip out his camera because he wasn’t holding it before I jumped off the cliff, but he scrolls through photos of me on the screen. The first one is of me getting ready to jump to my ‘death.’ Then he scrolls through a dozen more of them, taken in rapid succession. Some of them aren’t that great—would’ve been hard if he was waiting until I turned my back on him—but some of them… they’re breathtaking. When he passes one, I have to tell him to go back so I can get a better look.

It’s right after I’ve let go of the pipe, about halfway down the cable line. My arms are stretched above my head, my right hand still loosely holding onto the iron bar. My hair has fallen out of its bun and is radiating around me. My knees bend, my head tilted up. I vaguely remember looking to the sky before crashing into the water. In the unfocused distance, I see Lila’s form, her hands cupped around her mouth. The environment around us is stone and green, river water, and muddy sand. It’s a beautiful photo.

“This is a nice camera,” I tell Ren.

“It’s old,” he laments, sounding sorrowful, but when I look at him, he’s still wearing that lopsided smile. “My parents bought some new ones, and they gave me this last Christmas.”

“Your parents are photographers?”

“They work mostly for National Geographic. They go all over the world. It’s amazing.”

It sounds amazing.

“Can you send these to me?” I ask. Ren fiddles with his camera. He turns it off and puts the lens cap on before replacing it in its bag. “Of course. Give me your number.”

“Smooth move!” Lila calls.

He laughs, the skin in the corner of his eyes crinkling. He hands me his phone. “I think Jasper beat me to it.”

“Jasper and I barely like each other,” I say, not unkindly. I type my number into his phone and hand it back. “We didn’t even talk to each other before this trip.”

That lopsided smile widens. “He saw you first; therefore, he has dibs. Unless, of course,” and here Ren winks at me, “you say otherwise.”

I laugh.

As promised, Lila shows me how to climb the cliff. There’s a shallow part of the river where the rocks are half submerged. It’s about a five-minute walk northward. She leads me across, feet smooth and sure, going with a patient speed as I follow behind her, slipping often and almost falling into the river. One side is the calm pond we jumped into, while the other is rippling and crashing together. The cliff she leads me to slants up, with parts jutting out that Lila instructs me to use as hand and foot holds as we climb. It’s not so dangerous, but it makes me nervous, nonetheless. Although, there is a narrow, flat area ten feet up that we can stand on, and the rest of the way is easy. Ten minutes only, indeed.

This time I see that Ren is holding the camera, ready for us to jump. Thomas is still by the barbecue, but he’s turned around to watch us. I’ve already jumped and swum to the other side, heart-pounding, and Lila about to take her turn when Jasper appears.

It’s the thump of a backpack landing in the sand behind us that alerts everyone to his presence. Thomas and I turn around—Ren focuses on Lila with the camera—as Jasper jumps down the five-foot cliff.

“Took you long enough,” Thomas says. “What took so long?”

“I would’ve thought five feet would be too much for you,” I say.

He shoots me an annoyed glance. I grin wide, and for a moment, he looks so thrown off that he doesn’t immediately answer Thomas’s question.

“It’s been a while,” Jasper says slowly, eyes lingering on me before turning his full attention to Thomas. “I took a wrong turn at Turnip Creek.”

I almost frown. What? Is there mud on my face? I lift a hand to my cheek, but I don’t think there’s anything there.

“Well,” Thomas begins, and behind us, we hear a splash as Lila lands in the water from the cliff above, “you’re just on time. I’m about ready to make the hot dogs.”

And just like that, the cook pulls out two dozen hot dogs and a bag of buns, and how he managed to carry those in his backpack without complaining or crushing the buns, I’ll have to ask.

Jasper picks up his pack and shoulders it, returning his attention to me. He looks composed now, but his hand fiddles around the edge of his pocket where I know his Camel cigarettes must be, and he asks me, “So, how was it?”

“Amazing,” I say. “It’s better than a roller coaster. Scarier, but better.”

“Exactly why I don’t do it.”

“Jasper!” There’s a whirlwind of an Indian boy passing me, and the next thing I know, Ren is tackling Jasper into a bear hug. Then Lila reaches the beach, and she wastes no time in joining the fiasco.

“Ren, get off me! Lila, you’re soaking wet!”

I wander over to Thomas. “So, how did you manage to carry all that without crushing the bread?”

Not looking at me but instead concentrating on his cooking, Thomas picks up a long, plastic container with an odd, blue-colored substance on the sides—a cool pack. “Keeps the hot dogs cold inside but also means the bread is cold. Cold, but not crushed.”

“Must’ve been awkward in a backpack.”

“Definitely was.”

Jasper has managed to break free of the Ren-Lila prison and stomps toward one of the chairs. Ren stays behind to mess with his camera, but Lila is trailing behind him, trying to explain that she’s excited because she hasn’t seen him in so long.

“It hasn’t even been two hours!”

Lila snorts. “Try a whole year. You didn’t even come for winter break!”

“How come you like to cook?” I ask Thomas.

He shrugs. “You could say it’s a calling. I’ve always liked it, but I started getting into it when I was, I don’t know, twelve years old. That’s when Ren’s parents started leaving him at home to go on short-term trips. It was like an experiment for us to see what crazy things we could come up with.”

“Ren’s good at cooking too?”

Thomas laughs. “No! He’s horrible at it.”

“So, you’re the cook, and he’s the photographer,” I say. Lila wasn’t kidding when she told me who everyone was this morning.

“Yeah.” He nods, rolls over some of the hot dogs. “You got something you’re good at?”

“I’m good at soccer,” I say. “And I’m a fast runner.”

“Captain of the team?”

I slide my gaze uneasily away from his. “This fall, I will be.”

“That a bad thing?”

“No, not really.” But my voice comes out flat, and I know it’s because Melanie would say it’s a bad thing. She had wanted to be one of the captains too, and I feel bad for her when I know I shouldn’t.

“Hey!” Lila shouts, and I jump. She’s only a foot behind us. “June, come over here. I’ve got something to show you.”

What she has to show me is the area she’s created for us. Jasper has claimed one of the three chairs. Her pack is in one of the other chairs, and all three are angled towards a fire pit in the middle. She’s laid out two blankets on the other side. There’s a bucket between them, though there’s nothing in it yet.

“How long are we planning to stay here?” I ask.

Lila flashes a smile. “Maybe ‘till midnight.”

Jasper rolls his eyes. “Your parents will be furious.”

She still has her attention on me, but she slaps Jasper in the back of the head. “Rachel’s home. She’ll come up with something for me. Sit down, June. You can have one of the chairs as our guest of honor.”

As I do as she instructs, she yells for Ren to sit on one of the blankets. She joins him as he shows her the pictures he took. Soon after, Thomas comes over, hot dogs in tow, and we have a feast for a late afternoon lunch.

Like breakfast, I try to sit in my chair and eat as silently as possible, but I’m warming up to Jasper’s friends fast. They’re hilarious, but more than that, they’re so welcoming. I learn more about the mischievous pranks they’ve pulled, including the ones from when Jasper still lived in Maryland. I don’t know how they haven’t landed in jail for the night—excluding that one time Lila spent three hours there—and I don’t know how they haven’t broken any bones. Also excluding, of course, that one time Ren broke his big toe running into a door as they ran from Lila’s mother. They have a lot of fun telling me these stories, and they show their remorse when Jasper moved up North.

“It was,” Lila says gravely, “the loss of a boy who gave a great artistic touch to our pranks.”

“Not for lack of ideas,” Jasper says. He reaches forward to grab another hot dog and bun.

“And everyone still gets angry with us,” Ren adds.

Thomas bobs his head. “But only for the ones they know for sure was us.”

Beyond rehashing their antics, they continue to catch up for a year missed with Jasper. During breakfast, they hadn’t included me very much, probably because they were focused on the friend they hadn’t seen in so long. Now, though, they begin to inquire about me too.

“You haven’t graduated yet?” Ren asks, the only other graduate of the group. Lila and Thomas, like me, have one more year of high school.

“Not yet.”

“And you don’t want to leave Boston for college?” Lila asks, eyes wide. She obviously wants to get out of her town once she finishes high school, unlike me.

“Not really. It’s my home.”

“And you have a friend named Georgia?” Thomas asks after I’ve mentioned that she has a funny story behind her name.

“She also has a cat named Adam,” Jasper says.

And here, they stop talking over themselves. The last sound is Ren’s plastic fork scraping against the paper plate, which, although doesn’t have the same effect as steel, is nerving all the same. They all blink at me.

“I was five,” I defend, and the memories bring me back. April was a lot older and more into dogs than she was cats. Our parents, however, decided a cat was a lot less work to take care of. Therefore, an angry April decided to shun all things to do with the cat, and the official namer duty fell onto my shoulders.

“Most five year olds name their cats Fluffy or Pepper or Mr. Puffballs,” Lila says.

“Mr. Puffballs?” I ask.

Ren jerks his thumb at Thomas, to which Thomas says defensively, “I was four! Younger than June, anyway.”

“Anyway,” I say slowly, hiding a smile behind my hand. “I don’t know.”

Ren blinks again. “That’s it? I don’t know.’”

“Well…” Remembering the story, I feel my face start to heat up.

“Oh!” Lila pumps a fist in the air. “Embarrassing stories are the best!”

“It’s not embarrassing,” I object.

In his chair near me, Jasper leans forward. “I gotta hear this.”

Their eyes plead with me for the story, and I think it really isn’t so bad. I was, after all, only five years old. “All right, so I was in kindergarten, and there was this boy named Adam. And, I don’t know, he was one of my first friends. I thought he was awesome.”

“Hold on.” Lila puts a hand up. “Are you saying you named your cat after your first crush?”

“I was five!”

“Well, kids have their infatuations,” Thomas says. “Ask Ren about Lila.”

“It was a very odd experience to have a boy fawn over me in the first grade,” Lila says. “Odd, but also enlightening to know I could have so much power over someone.”

Ren’s face is almost as red as mine. “It was a really long time ago and bad judgment on my part. Lila is a tyrant.”

“Hey!”

Ren motions for me to go on.

I can’t hide my amusement this time, and through laughter, I manage to get it out. “There’s not much else to tell. During lunch in the cafeteria one day, we were under the table, and he kissed me on the cheek, which was, you know, a big deal when you’re five years old—”

“Scandalous,” Lila says.

“—and that weekend we got my cat.”

“You named him Adam?” Thomas asks.

“I named him Adam.”

Ren almost bounces in his spot on the blanket, eagerly. “Did you tell him?”

I groan. “Of course, I did! I’ve never been able to live it down. We’re still in the same circle of friends, and he never lets me forget that I named my cat after him.”

“Wait. Wait,” Jasper cuts in. “Are we talking about Adam O’Shea? You named your cat after Adam O’Shea?”

Lila, in her chair between Jasper and me, looks from him to me to him again. “Who’s Adam O’Shea?”

Jasper looks ready and eager to spill on who Adam O’Shea is, but then he glances at me, and surprisingly, he keeps his mouth shut. Instead, he says only, “He’s our school’s biggest football star at the moment.”

Lila whistles. “He’s gotta be some big shot for a cat to be named after!”

He is also, I think silently, Melanie’s boyfriend. Or at least he was until two weeks ago.

“So,” I say casually, moving on. I look at Thomas. “Tell me this story about Mr. Puffballs.”

The conversations don’t stop. They flow like the canyon’s river, swift and easy, and our laughter fills up the space between the cliff walls. And when the hot dogs are gone and an hour more has passed, Lila and Ren lead me up the cliff again while Thomas stays behind with Jasper. I lose count of how many times I go down the line, and we only stop when dinner is announced. The sun dips into the horizon, and we reclaim our spots around the pit eating junk food while Ren tries to fish for minnows. While Jasper is lighting the fire and Lila decides that today will be the day she out-fishes Ren, I lean over to Thomas and say, “You guys do this a lot?”

“Come out to Sandy Place?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Not as much as we used to,” he explains. “But when Jasper is here, we always come.”

I mull over that for a moment. “Does Jasper wish he never moved?”

Thomas is silent for a moment. He lifts his shoulders, lets them fall. “He hated that he had to leave at first. He left the summer before high school started. After the first year, he seemed to like it. He met some new friends and got used to the city, but after the sophomore year started, things got… I don’t know. It has to do with some girl he met at school.”

“Yeah?” I say. “Maybe I know her.”

“Maybe,” Thomas agrees, reaching for his phone. Clicking on it, he goes on, “Well, I guess she was interested in him, and he wasn’t into her. She turned nasty. Started making up all these rumors about him.” He raises his phone, a picture pulled up. “Know her?”

And I freeze. I stare at the photo.

It’s an older photo. Jasper is younger by a few years, his hair cut so short there’s no bleached color to it. He’s wearing more colors, though his ensemble is still dark in tone. He’s smiling, standing next to a girl with long brown hair that’s wavy and shiny, her smile matching his. His arm is around her shoulders, and she’s leaning against a counter in someone’s kitchen. It’s not her kitchen. I know that right away because I know what her kitchen looks like. Her brown eyes stare into the camera, earnest and happy. I know the look in her gaze when they’re not, even when she’s plastered a smile onto her face.

“I think her name is Mel,” Thomas goes on. “Pretty sure, anyway. So, do you? Recognize her, I mean.”

All I can do is stare. My blood is frozen, and I hope my face hasn’t gone pale. I open my mouth, but no words come out. And thankfully, I’m saved by Lila.

“Hey guys!” she shouts. “I got a little something for partying tonight!”

I jerk around, away from Thomas, and turn my full attention to Lila, who’s holding her backpack in one hand and a bottle of what looks like Captain Morgan in the other.

The shock still runs through me. I could definitely use some of that right now.